


a knife making love to a wound (my dress is bluer than a sky weeping bones)

by possibilist



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, TW: suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 02:20:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2490890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You figured you’d lived long enough, born the suffering of existence longer than anyone should have to; you’d fallen in love; you’d seen the world: there was nothing keeping you here." bc someone asked me if carmilla had ever contemplated suicide, & i’m a sucker for angst (that ends in fluff bc): carmilla/laura.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a knife making love to a wound (my dress is bluer than a sky weeping bones)

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning: suicidal ideation/thoughts, etc.

a knife making love to a wound (my dress is bluer than a sky weeping bones)  
.  
i am what i have done—/ a sweeping gesture to the thorn of mast jutting from my mother’s spine—spine a series of narrow steps leading to the temple of her neck where the things we workshop demand we hurl her heart from that height, still warm, still humming with the holy music of an organ—/ we do. we do. we do and do and do. —natalie diaz, ‘self-portrait as a chimera  
/  
There are a few things you will never tell her—things about what it feels like to turn, how during the war you lost your hearing for weeks and weeks while bombs were going off, only you couldn’t scream or move or make any of it stop, and you didn’t know if you were imagining the ground shaking or if you actually were inside the earth in shatters and shifts. Things about how lonely it is to never grow up.  
Mostly you’ll never tell her what they did to you before they put you in that coffin.  
And you will never, ever (and for you, that is literally an eternity) tell Laura—good, idealistic, brilliant, beautiful Laura—what you tried to do a few times after you got out.  
.  
You tell it like a history lesson because it has to be; your brain cannot allow it to be anything else.  
That night, with the entire world ringing in your ears, you broke into a store in Vienna, stole some clothes. You picked up a newspaper—sixty million people had died. You always try to say that vampires don’t cry, and technically, they don’t—it’s not physically possible. But you had sobbed, and you had slept in the cold under the stars in a park that night, because the idea of being inside had caused the base of your scalp to prickle hot with unspeakable fear. You were claustrophobic for some time, walking for hours through the countryside ravaged with blood and dirt, thousands of tiny poppies starting to bloom around the bodies. You made your way through Berlin with your eyes closed, because your hearing was coming back but you couldn’t bear to notice those silences. And then you ended up in Paris, because of the glimmer in the middle of the night, because Paris breathed.  
It wasn’t hard to steal money, to find yourself a gorgeous apartment and plenty of gorgeous women—Paris never lacks those—but your head hurt; all of your broken bones had healed but your wrists still ached.   
.  
You started university because you’d missed a lot of things—art, philosophy, literature, science. You tried to delve into the newness of it all: the Modern, all of the post-impressionists, the development of surgery and antibiotics, Walter Benjamin, film. But one night you rested your head against some beautiful girl’s lap and read Adorno, and he wrote with almost as much desolation as you felt, because even in the city of light things were dark and bloody, and you still couldn’t hear right.  
.  
You figured you’d lived long enough, born the suffering of existence longer than anyone should have to; you’d fallen in love; you’d seen the world: there was nothing keeping you here.   
You can’t really decapitate yourself, you’re pretty sure, so you thought about staking, the logistics of it. You set things up comfortably, otherwise: the big, pretty white bed in the big, pretty airy apartment. Paris in the wintertime.  
But you only got the stake pressed a half-inch into your skin before fireworks started going off—the turn of another year—and you sat, desolate, with an unpurposed tool in your hand, a poppy blooming something so close to blood just above your quiet, still heart.  
.  
It happened every decade or so, the aching, seeping loneliness—not that you didn’t, and don’t, try to ward them off: you lived in New York and Oakland in the late 1960s to help organize protests when you could; you made it to Woodstock; you did your best to help out for a few months in Nigeria; you moved to Russia during the Cold War, just to get away from Western rhetoric; you adored the grunge scene in the early 90s. You studied at the best universities in the world, met some of the most brilliant and kind humans: you learned Polish just to read Szymborska late at night in her native tongue; you kept Discipline and Punish in your bag for months; you saw openly queer writers like Winterson create gorgeous love stories. You’ve never had a cold bed.  
But you’ve woken, every single time, to claustrophobic, drowning nightmares for the last seventy years; your wrists have never really healed.  
Each time you managed to get the stake a little closer, gritting your teeth and trying to convince yourself that ashes to ashes dust to dust seems like the easiest thing you’ve ever done.  
.  
What you’ll never tell Laura, as she traces the scars above your heart—the splintering wood caused your broken skin to shine rougher than the rest—that glimmer in the dawn, is that the stake was so sturdy in your hands the first night you’d spent in her (your) dorm.   
“What are these from?” she asks.  
You just shake your head, and she seems to take the non-answer without hesitation. She’s beautiful, and she’s so wonderfully young. You’ve fallen in love with her, completely on accident, and for as much as it terrifies you, it’s also, in a lot of ways, saved you. You don’t think you’ll ever be capable of anything but some distance, some quiet, some brooding—you’ve seen hundreds of millions of people die senselessly; you still can’t hear quite right—but Laura laces your fingers with a little smile and then kisses you.  
“What were the nineties like?” she asks, and you groan, because you’ve fallen in love with the one girl who doesn’t fall asleep after sex.  
But you appease her: “Well, I had an undercut, for one,” you say, just to see her expression.  
She looks appalled, which delights you like you knew it would. “You did not,” she says.  
“Oh, I really did. I’m quite glad flannel is back in, as well.”  
She snorts a laugh, runs her fingers absentmindedly in random patterns over your stomach. “I’d have liked you in the fifties most, I think.”  
You roll your eyes. “It’s the decent collars, right?”  
“Hey,” she whines.  
You kiss her to cut off a ramble, and for a few moments, it’s the right kind of quiet, and you’re not so lonely, not anymore. You feel so much closer to eighteen, heady and breathless: there are very different sorts of blooms in your chest.


End file.
